Creating Sustainable Advantageous Capabilities - An overview

When you look at companies, from 2 person partnerships to the Fortune 500, if you see significant success, it is almost certainly due to the developing and maintaining of sustainable advantageous capabilities. That is, developing a combination of people, process, systems and/or structures that create results that are difficult or ideally impossible to match. The more of these that are combined to make up the SAC (Sustainable Advantageous Capabilities), typically the more advantageous it is. The large majority of SACs are anchored in capabilities in people tied closely and aligned with process and systems capabilities.

Key to developing sustainable advantages and removing barriers to them are understanding the competencies, motivations, tendencies… of your people and potential employees so you can create an organization capable of having a SAC (many are hopelessly incapable and as a result their survival over time is in question). For the last 10 years, we've deployed what we believe is the most powerful assessment tool ever available to understand these issues, to dramatically improve the people selection process, to assist in building effective teams and to create an inspired workforce. The results of this are more goal achievement, higher retention and a far great ability to maintain SACs.

Crucial to developing sustainable advantageous capabilities is how things are done, the processes.

To excel here, you first have to understand the entire value stream that you participate in - where it is now and where it is going. You also have to fully understand any sources of variability in the decision and action flows in producing each of your outputs. With this understanding, you have to develop your segment of the value stream where you leverage your capabilities often with those of others, where you align people and systems and tools with process effectiveness and where your understanding enables you to eliminate waste, remove the key barriers and pursue opportunistic innovation.

Overall, a Sustainable Advantageous Capability is an effect or a result which comes from several causes: